Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Perhaps this is an image of actress Naomi Watts testing her Antigravitarian powers:

Or maybe it's just another altered photo of a Hollywood dream girl.

Either way, why doesn't this image shock? Why does it seem almost natural to portrait a beautiful movie star in a supernatural pose?

Because, I think, we've developed a subconscious tendency to replace, to some degree, the angels of our religious traditions with the celluloid fantasies of today. Certainly it's not that much of a stretch between heavenly messengers who visit earth and earthly luminaries who look just heavenly.

See what I mean? The main difference being, of course, that Ms. Watts is here displaying a lot more leg than your traditional presentations of Biblical angels. Which will strike many observers as a pretty good thing.

Of course, not every winged star possesses such visual charms. I don't mean to pick on Tiny Fey, but . . .

Humanity's communal dream life is haunted by a sense of flying. Yes, you must be able to remember those nightly visions in which your body has floated free of gravity, letting you soar through the sky with a magical power that's both thrilling and taken for granted.

As has been pointed out by any number of observers, experiencing films shares a good deal in common with dreaming dreams, so it should come as no surprise that floating and flying feature largely in contemporary cinema. For reasons related to their long obsession with mystical martial arts, the Chinese are particularly likely to portray the human body as an Antigravitarian object.

I'll allow stills taken from one recent Chinese martial arts movie to represent and dramatize this trend. The movie is Zhang Yimou's Hero, which was released in 2002 and stars a perfect cast that includes Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Maggie Cheung, Jet Li, and Zhang Ziyi.

Here in Hero, the special effects suggest that you can slough off gravity at will, as you might dead skin, which always makes for a very satisfying fantasy experience:

Unfortunately, fascism appears to triumph at the end of Hero, which mars the movie badly. For fascism is not an Antigravitarian form of government. In fact, it's got the worst kind of gravity written all over it.

Monday, February 16, 2009

If death is the most potent manifestation of gravity on earth, then the general resurrection at the end of time is the most potent manifestation of Antigravity. Here is one portrayal of that resurrection by Hieronymus Bosch, as painted in the year 1485:

Of course, the story of the last judgment continues to develop from the moment captured by Bosch, for the reanimated bodies that are here seen rising from their graves have yet to be assigned to their eternal dwelling places in either heaven or hell.

Heaven, as we know, represents the great goal and ultimate reward of all spiritual striving. But what about hell? Isn't it enough that we have to age and die? Do some of us really have to face the prospect of ceaseless damnation?

Alas, in the cruel vision of almost all world religions, some of us do. Yes, hell waits for unrepentant sinners, and for them gravity will carry a force far more malignant than any ever experienced on earth. Down, down, down (it is said) they will go, and from hell there is no exit or return. Thus Hans Memling's painting of the year 1472:

The social psychology behind hell is pretty obvious. Once certain kinds of organized religion gets their hooks into you, they count on your fear of hell to keep you where you are -- in a weak, fearful, and submissive faith. And that's why you should never trust anyone who aims to gain control over your life by exploiting your fear of eternal punishment.

The fact is, our great concern in this lifetime should be to ameliorate earthly hells, not to become obsessed with visions of postmortem infernos.

But doesn't the very existence of earthly hells suggest that visions of Satan's realm represent something very real? I would answer that question by echoing a bit of medieval Christian mystical wisdom: "Nothing burns in hell but the ego."

And when the illusory nature of the ego is finally and universally realized, hell will just have to close up shop. It and all its horrors will -- poof! -- be gone forever.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

When covering the Antigravity beat, you're bound to encounter messiahs, angels, gods, and saints, and this being St. Valentine's Day, I thought it wise to trot out the appropriate figure, with Antigravitational angels in attendance.

This image then, painted by Jacobo Bassano in or around 1575, shows St. Valentine baptizing St. Lucilla:

Admittedly, this is not everyone's idea of a romantic interlude, but let it be noticed that the angels hovering over this scene are extremely cupid-like (see my post of 12/25/08 by clicking here), and though Valentine did not, as near as we can tell, lead a sexually indulgent life before embarking on his career as a model of Christian virtue, his feast day, which the world has adopted as a celebration of earthly love, is said to mark the beginning of mating season for birds.

The latter claim holds some local interest for me, since I heard the mourning doves in my lady love's garden start cooing just two days ago--for the first time this year. Such song would suggest that some billing and other intimate behavior have begun to happen here in the borough of Brooklyn, as they may well have done in your neighborhood as well. At least in the northern hemisphere, the days lengthen, and the building of nests and the flowering of crocuses cannot be far away. So thanks again, St. Valentine: You do make a happy marker on our calendars.

As for St. Lucilla, she seems to have been a fairly run-of-the-mill martyr, which doesn't necessarily mean that her soul ascended to heaven in a run-of-the-mill sort of way. Martyrdom, let us remember, was considered a great blessing during Christianity's early centuries, for it guaranteed eternal life in celestial realms. (Does any of this sound familiar?) To reach back a bit to the mourning doves and the lyrics to a sentimental 19th-century song, Lucilla must have been happy to feel her spirit "pluming for flight."

Farewell gravity, hello heaven. What more could you ask for?

P.S. Sweet greetings to lovers everywhere. Please remember that true love is forever kind and courteous, speaking no word in callousness or wrath.

Friday, February 13, 2009

The year 2001 saw the publication of British journalist Nick Cook's bestselling book The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology.

"Inside" was a bit of an overstatement, since antigravity technology is one of the most classified areas of U.S. government defense-related research, and it is questionable whether anyone is entirely "inside" it, given that its hypothetical advances are shielded in so many ways from so many eyes. Probably not even the president, if he cared to take an interest, would be capable of accessing every corner of whatever super-sensitive developments are taking place in this field.

Nick Cook claims, and it is a hard claim to refute, that the power of antigravity, if harnessed to serve human purposes, would completely revolutionize every area of technological progress, not just our military capabilities.

Altered sources of clean energy would abound. Our methods of constructing tall buildings would utterly change as our present hoisting cranes disappeared from the skyline, to be replaced by antigravitational devices that would float the most massive materials from ground level to upper floors with ridiculous ease.

The shape of our aircraft would be transformed from modified bird forms to perfect disks, and unidentified flying objects would become a thing of the past as our own identifiable saucers filled the sky. Such vehicles would whisk us across our great oceans in minutes and, possibly, open nearby galaxies to our astronauts as antigravitational force was used to propel our spacecraft to the speed of light.

Is there any actual evidence that real breakthroughs have been made in this field? Well, perhaps. Over the years Nick Cook has pursued a number of leads in this almost impenetrable subject area, and if you read his book you'll discover some interesting hypotheses about what might be forthcoming in the field of antigravity. But you must prepare yourself to be more mystified than enlightened.

The state of antigravity studies is revealed by the questions surrounding the photograph above (not from Cook's book), which was apparently taken of the skies over southern England and shows what may or may not be the contrail of a hypersonic vehicle that may or may not employ antigravity technology to push its speed far beyond that of any officially recognized aircraft. What's certain is that the pictured contrail is unlike any that most of us have ever seen, since the engine or engines creating it seem to be pulsing out energy in a way that's entirely different from what we're accustomed to.

This entire area remains highly problematical (you might say Area 51-ish), and our understanding of it is further complicated by the fact that many effects (like magnetic levitation) which mimic antigravitational states be can actually be explained by conventional technology. Still, speculation about scientific concepts of antigravity can be fascinating, and there is nothing in the world that will ever stop it or even slow it down.

Monday, February 9, 2009

(This image is worth clicking onto examine close up, for it chieflyconsists of a photograph of the rathergorgeous gilded phoenix that appearsin low relief on the facade of themain Brooklyn [NY] Public Library.)

From our friends at Wikipedia:

“A phoenix is a mythical bird with a tail of beautiful gold and red plumage (or purple and blue, by some sources. It has a 500 to 1,000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again. The new phoenix is destined to live as long as its old self. The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe, thus being almost immortal and invincible — it is also said that it can heal a person with a tear from its eyes and make them temporarily immune to death. The phoenix is a symbol of fire and divinity . . . [It eventually became] a symbol of Christ representing His resurrection, immortality, and life-after-death.”

About Me

I'm the author of several books as well as a lecturer, a photographer, and a graphic artist. If you require a single label for me, "independent scholar" will do as well as any.
My intellectual influences range from the Greek classics and the ancient texts of Judeo-Christianity to William Blake, James Joyce, Norman O. Brown, and Joseph Campbell.
Lately I've been identifying a central concern of the human race by using the word "Antigravity." As you'll recognize, this force has always been hovering around the spiritual life of humanity in one form or another.
My main contribution, I suppose, is to reject all dogma and try to let our transcendent nature speak for itself in a semi-random series of words and images. This sounds pretty solemn, but I've been known to display flashes of humor, and I hope I'll be forgiven for satirizing my own approach from time to time.